From Fiction to Films

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]  lot of my friends don’t like going to the Cinema with me. This is mainly due to the fact that, unable to disguise my disgust, I spend the subsequent hours passionately swearing over a cappuccino in the Cinema café, telling them exactly why the £8.74 they’ve just spent on sitting in the dark for two hours was money wasted. Why? Because I’ve read the book. And, 99.99% of the time, the book was better.

Adapting a book into a film is often a calculated move for filmmakers; they are immediately guaranteed an audience for their movie due to the fan base the book has already created. It is easier to pitch a movie to a production company if you can safely guarantee that thousands of people are going to pay to see it.  It is in satisfying these thousands of fans that the difficultly lies.

Of course, there have been some phenomenally successful and beloved book-to-film adaptations. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a classic, along with the new trilogy of Hobbit films. The Harry Potter franchise is similarly beloved and financially successful. Even The Twilight Saga, though many would debate its quality, was a phenomenal success at the box office. It can also be an enjoyable experience for the readers, watching the world they have discovered through the paper of the page begin to evolve on the screen, waiting for their favourite characters to be cast, downloading the soundtrack as soon as it becomes available. The directors are happy – they are being provided with more films to make. The producers are happy – these films are making millions. The audience is happy – they’re enjoying the films. Everything is great. Until the audience isn’t happy any more.

But why aren’t the audience happy? The directors keep making these movies, the producers keep making the money, actors are getting more jobs – what can the audience possibly complain about?

Oh yes – that’s it. These book-to-film adaptations, unlike The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, actually aren’t very good.

It’s become too easy for them. It’s become a formula; identify which Young Adult series is emerging into a bestseller, secure the rights, write a screenplay and turn it into a movie. We’ve allowed them to get sloppy. As an audience, we need to keep these directors and producers on their toes.

Earlier this year, I cringed my way through The Host, a film in which there was a lot of zooming in on attractive people with dirt on their faces. I think there was also supposed to be an alien invasion at one point, although by then I think I had zoned out, more interested in contemplating what I was having for dinner than whether the forgettable characters would survive whatever artistically dirty situation they found themselves in. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters was similarly panned by critics, receiving a mortifyingly low rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The director of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones decided to portray the villain who in the book had been a mysterious, charismatic businessmen into a deranged lunatic with dreadlocks, throwing swords around and frothing at the mouth, thereby smothering any chance of him appearing genuinely creepy or sinister. I just don’t get it.

It has now reached the point where books are being written deliberately for this process. The rights to I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore (the combined pseudonym of James Frey and Jobie Hughes) were bought by Dreamworks in 2009, before the book was actually published in 2010. However, the film (released in 2010) was a flop and plans to adapt the book’s sequels have since been shelved. It is clear that this process, with directors, authors and producers working together sneakily to try and earn a bit of quick cash, is not reliable and often leads to the production of underwhelming books and films. Yet still they persist. Eager to suck up a little of the success of The Hunger Games movies, Red Wagon Entertainment secured the rights for Veronica Roth’s novel Divergent. The film is due for release in March of this year and, despite the appearance of Kate Winslet as the film’s villain, doesn’t have a particularly inspiring trailer.

Aside from the laziness that this process inspires in directors and production companies, there is a kind of ‘glossiness’ that appears to be inherent in the translation from a book to a film. Even J.K. Rowling, whose book-to-film adaptations are commonly renowned as being amongst the most successful there is, resented this process, telling Daniel Radcliffe in an interview ,“of course, you’re all too good looking for Harry, Ron and Hermione, but that’s just Hollywood”.  The grittiness of The Time Traveler’s Wife is completely lost in the translation from book to film, with Henry (Eric Bana) and Claire (Rachel McAdams) appearing as Barbie and Ken –esque characters – attractive people just acting out the events of the novel – rather than flesh and blood, flawed and sometimes unlikeable people, like the characters in the book.

Of course, it is unrealistic to expect a direct translation from paper to screen – there quite simply isn’t enough time to put everything in although, having said that, judging by the success of the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there would certainly be an audience willing to watch Aragorn jauntily bimble his way across Middle Earth for about forty-seven hours. But it isn’t practical. Regardless, the best book-to-film adaptations are not direct translations anyway, but re-workings of the same story, designed to thrill on screen instead of on the page. The Bourne trilogy, starring Matt Damon, are almost completely different from the books on which they are based, penned by Robert Ludlum but, because of the immense skill and passion that has gone into making them, make wonderful films on their own. Deviance from the original source is not always a bad thing.

[pullquote style=”left” quote=”dark”]By sanitizing it, the filmmakers extinguish the story’s sincerity, turning it into just another beginning, middle and end[/pullquote]

But sometimes it gets silly. Outraged at the changes the screenwriters made to the end of My Sister’s Keeper, author Jodi Picoult famously had to be physically escorted off the set. Last year, I interviewed author Dorothy Koomson, whose novel The Ice Cream Girls had been adapted into a series for ITV, released in February of that year. I remember her telling me, slightly sadly, how they had ‘dumbed down’ the contents of her novel for the viewers, making a variety of unnecessary changes, most controversially the identity of the murderer. In the film adaptation of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, based on the book by Louis de Bernieres the ending is completely changed; the thought-provoking, moving ending of the novel substituted for a sanitized, Hollywood version that leaves readers feeling somehow robbed. When asked about the changed ending, de Bernieres said, “It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby’s ears being put on backwards”. It is as though filmmakers think audiences are unable to digest a story without everything being tied-up nicely, as though they think we are too stupid to understand a story that doesn’t have a happy ending. In reality, it is the heartbreak and the difficulty of dealing with a troublesome ending that makes a story compelling. By sanitizing it, the filmmakers extinguish the story’s sincerity, turning it into just another beginning, middle and end.

Despite Dorothy Koomson’s unfortunate experiences with TV however, book-to-TV adaptations seem like the future of entertainment. HBO’s Game of Thrones continues to be a triumph, getting progressively stronger by the season. With six books to go, the future looks financially bright for the directors, producers and actors involved. But do we really need to see our books on the screen, big or small? As Terry Pratchett famously said, it’s as if we don’t deem a book worth reading until we know it’s going to be turned into a film or television series. It’s as though we, as readers, see adaptations as a badge of merit. Should we not be satisfied with reading the world, imagining the characters in our own heads?

Regardless, the current, lazy system is patronising to readers. We don’t need our novels ‘dumbed’ or watered down. Give us the raw, challenging material – the reason we enjoyed the book in the first place. We have to start making these directors and film production companies work hard to earn their money, rather than just churning out the 49^th instalment in a forgettable franchise where every ending culminates in New York being blown up by aliens. I, for one, have had enough and my friends have had enough of listening to me whine over my coffee. So let’s stop buying cinema tickets for films we know will be underwhelming at £8.74 a go. Let’s put a spanner in this mighty mechanism that has been keeping Hollywood ticking for the last decade. Let’s start a revolution.

It almost sounds like the script for a movie…